Producers of livestock are continually looking for ways to increase yield (e.g., milk, eggs) and/or quality of meat for consumption. Even for animals grazing on pastures, it has been determined that plants, such as grasses, provide decreased nutritional value as the plant grows. In response, a number of livestock producers have begun feeding their animals newly sprouted seed grain to bolster the level of nutrition contained in the diets of their animals. One recommended feeding regiment includes providing newly sprouted seed grain at a daily feed rate of two percent of an animal's live weight per day to achieve beneficial results.
Systems are available to produce the newly sprouted seed grain, utilizing small trays for the growing surface on which a layer of seed grain sprouts for harvesting, typically in one week or less. The trays are small, typically limited to a “footprint” of several square feet in area, due to the weight of sprouted seed grain that is harvested, which contains a high level of moisture, and which forms a tangled mass of interconnected roots that is difficult to separate into smaller pieces. Manually maintained systems require a significant amount of physical labor, including spreading seed grain in trays, placing the trays in a multi-layered rack, advancing (pushing) the trays along the rack, emptying the trays (harvesting the sprouted seed grain) and then washing the trays before repeating this continuous process. While this arrangement may be manageable for producers having a small number of livestock to maintain, a significant amount of producers have a sufficient number of livestock for which a daily production of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds or more of sprouted seed grain is required. On a daily basis, lifting, moving and distributing 2,000 pounds of dense masses of wet sprouted seed grain manually is not practical.
While automated systems are available, utilizing similarly sized trays for harvesting the sprouted seed grain as utilized with manual systems, such automated systems are extremely expensive and thus, are not available to most livestock producers.
Accordingly, there is a need for a cost effective, compact system that can significantly increase the rate of production of sprouted seed grain while significantly reducing most of the more physically demanding tasks associated with such production.